


The First Ruin

by Potboy



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:35:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25426993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: Celeborn finally tells the tale of what he was doing in the First Age. A bleak tale told with some reluctance.
Comments: 47
Kudos: 23





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JustSphinx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustSphinx/gifts).



> 100% made up out of whole cloth, as it's been a long time since I cracked open one of my volumes of the History of Middle-earth, and I now don't even know where I put them. I don't _think_ it contradicts any canon anywhere, but you may know better.

“I do not like to remember that time.” Celeborn stroked the goose-grey tip of his quill over his mouth and regarded the library of Rivendell. Ruinous with age it seemed, now that Vilya had departed. Even the massive stones of the walls wore away over the passing of millennia. The shelves and the books, however, were mere centuries old, young by virtue of having been innumerable times remade.

Outside the many-paned window, a mild July was swathed in warm, pearl clouds, and the hidden valley dripped, weedy and verdant, in the mist.

“Nor do I wish to write this down. I regret continually that Daeron was lost, for only his art could have given true voice to the troubles of my heart. Oh, that I could have poured out this ancient grief to him, and have him turn it into song, that we might all weep and be comforted! Only he could have turned it into something worthy of telling.

“I put it down now, in my own hand, because there are no great elven bards left in Middle-earth to whom I could entrust the task. Indeed there is no one left in these lands who remembers that time but I. There are none left but I who remembers those people, not as figures from a tale, but as they might be parts of my own fea, beloved, fallible, glorious.”

He set his pen in its stand and rubbed his face. The day seemed to darken around him, but that was only memory. _Only memory? Might as well say ‘only pain.’_ Why should suffering not be dreaded, whether it were in the past or the future, within the heart or without?

Yet he had survived two reshapings of the world. He would survive this.

“A guest in my house—the Man, John—is writing a history of Middle-earth before the ice scoured it into what it is today. He is a great scholar, trained in the art of the pen, and though he listens to our songs he does not fully comprehend them until they are pinned down to paper like a butterfly. Of course he has found all the books written by the Noldor, and it is from them that he has taken much of his scholarship.

He asked me to record my own experiences, and I have told him some of the lighter things. But because the first destruction of my world was the hardest to bear, I have kept that tale behind my teeth, until now.

I hope he will find his way back here to read it before his book is published, or his life is ended, but if it is not to be so, still the account will be here for the next scholar, as long as scholarship endures.”

Celeborn rose, opened the window and stood a while in the moving air of the secluded valley. The note of the Loudwater in the distance was soothing, and the scent of pines from the hills mingled with that of the pot marigold in the kitchen garden. He caught himself in the act of turning toward the door, as though his body might have taken him to the woods, postponed once more this unwelcome task.

_Come, you faced it once. It can hardly be worse, recalled from safety at a distance._

“For him then, I set down these few glimpses of the end of the First Age from my own perspective, and to him I leave the decision whether to incorporate these things into his tale, or leave them out as unworthy of remembrance.”

_Enough hedging. Let the next word be the beginning. Flinch no more, but begin._

“The end of my world began in Novrod, whence I had been sent as an ambassador, with a gift of pearls. I was received abruptly and with signs of surprise, as though I had interrupted an important festival—I know now it was a war council. Yet they were courteous to me, and I was told I would be conveyed to the king’s private sitting room to speak with him alone, without my escort. There I had never been before, and did not know the way, so I thought little of being taken down strange corridors, closer and grimmer than any I had heretofore seen.”

The memory rises again—cramped, low tunnels, the strange metallic sheen and ring of the rock beneath the feet of marching, iron-shod dwarves. The sense, creeping, inexorable, and resisted with all of his goodwill, that something was horribly wrong. He hadn’t been afraid then, just puzzled, but now the images returned with an overlay of everything that came after. It was already hard to go on.

“I was still blithe, unaware of any danger, when from a side corridor I had just passed lashed out a spear and took me in the back of the knee. I fell, went for my axe, but I had been disarmed at the door and my hands clutched at my empty belt. I thought that this was an orc attack, that orcs had somehow infiltrated the dwarves’ stronghold, and it took me a truly foolish length of time to realize that I was being betrayed.

“They chained me and threw me into a pit far from help. Little more than a slot, it was, in the living stone of the mountain. Too narrow to lie down in, but deep, deeper than I could measure. There was no ceiling to it, but its walls were smoothed with dwarven skill so that it could not be escaped by climbing.

There I knelt in the utter dark, and the weight of the mountain pressed on me. The sightless abyss mocked my eyes as phantom shapes born of my own fear flashed and faded in the crushing blackness.

The weight, the airlessness, I could tolerate for a short while. I thought at first I was being held for ransom. Elu, my king, would give a ransom for me and I would be led out—perhaps even to command the reprisals that would surely come. For I was a prince of Doriath, and I told myself I could not be abandoned. I could not simply disappear. Someone would come. Galadriel was in the East, determined as always to find a kingdom of her own. But Elu would not abandon me, just as my grandfather, Elu’s brother Elmo, had not abandoned him.

I could not simply be lost, I thought, when the mountain pressed on my mind, and all my limbs screamed at being confined, barely able to move, for weeks, or months. I could not be abandoned. And yet Elmo had been lost, and Daeron had been lost and no search was made for either of them. How long would it be before I too became little more than a wailing ghost in the hollow spaces of the hills?

Here, separated from the pulse of the world, I could not tell night from day. I lost all sense of time and light. But voices I heard sometimes, when my ears had attuned themselves to the tremble of the rock. That was how I learned that they had killed my Lord.

Elu, greatest of the kings of Ennor, my lord, my kinsman, was dearer to me than my own father. The dwarves of Menegroth—our own people—had killed him, and the dwarves of Novrod bestirred themselves now to go and finish the deed by slaughtering the rest of us.

I heard the stir of armies, the rattle of mail coats, spears and axes singing as they were sharpened, and the echo of my own voice in the shaft of my imprisonment, fruitlessly screaming to be let out. 

Melian would protect my people, my home, I reminded myself. The dwarf army would not get through the walls of Doriath, held impenetrable by Melian’s will.

I heard the army depart and, dreadful though the rumours in the walls had been, the silence was worse. I scratched at the stone like a fox in a trap, bloodying my fingers. I screamed curses. I spoke fury to rock and water, but they would not listen to me, sick with hatred for them as I was.

The next I knew, the army had returned. Singing and cheering reverberated down every corridor. They had composed a victory ode, and it was in the faint echo of this music that I learned that Melian had fled, my citadel been sacked, and all its people scattered and destroyed. Doriath had fallen, and I had not even been there.

I lost myself. I know not for how long.


	2. Chapter 2

Outside the library, the eager sun had finally burst forth from the clouds, and light slanted through the bubbled green glass of the windows as if through a swiftly flowing stream. Celeborn raised his head, that had been bent over the black ink of his letters, and saw carved bookshelves, leather-backed tomes gleaming with lines of gold, walls into which the warmth of yeni of apple-wood fires had soaked. They surprised him, who had expected the darkness never-ending.

He stood and stretched, and on an impulse snatched up book and pen, taking them outside. There the air was full of movement, as the pine trees whispered to the beeches. The scent of them lay sweet and pungent on the air.

Celeborn climbed up the long path, book beneath his arm, until he came to the swathe of open grass land where a lightning strike and forest fire five hundred years ago had cleared a small meadow, full of flowers. There a lone oak had grown, like a… No, not like a queen in her own guarded city. Like an elf-tower standing slender above the cliffs, watchful and protective. He set his back to her and slid down to be cradled in her roots, remembering a long, long ago debt, and a strength that had saved him when his own could not.

“The next I knew with any certainty,” he wrote, “was when a voice from the top of the shaft fell upon me. I could not see who spoke. I had forgotten what seeing was. But the voice declared that if I was fortunate—if my kinsmen loved me enough—I would ‘ere long be ransomed.

“’How?’ I asked. ‘Who?’” for I had forgotten also how to speak.

“’We have sent to Dior King,’ the voice declared, ‘and said that if he would have you back, he must bring us the Nauglamir that was stolen from us, with the Silmaril in place in its setting. How much do you think he values you, oh Prince of Doriath? How much does he value the tears of his wife—she is your niece, is she not? If he but sees reason and restores to us what is ours, we will be at peace again, as we were of old. If not, well, you remain where you are, I have lost nothing, and Dior has been proved faithless. Who will follow him then?’”

_Peace,_ I thought, disgusted. _I will never be at peace with you again_. But still, the voice had told me much. I had feared that with Elu’s death and Melian’s abandonment, Doriath’s fall had been complete. I had pictured all the folk slain: fire in the masonry of the walls; the caverns cracking and falling in on themselves, a desolate tomb for the bodies within. I had wished to return only so I might die there too.

But if Dior had been crowned and sat upon the throne as a king with whom the dwarves were willing to negotiate, then there must be more left of my home than I had feared. This news put some life into me. Yet at the same time I pondered the cruel dilemma into which Dior had been placed.

I had seen Elu’s Silmaril, of course. I remember with ambivalence the beauty of its shape and the holiness of the mingled flame at its core. If one contemplated it, one saw at a remove a little of the spirit of Iluvatar. A great joy welled from it, and a sense of perfection, yet it was a perfection that accepted one’s imperfection, a constant duet between the mortal and the immortal in which even the mistakes were sacred. Ah! Even now, it remains beyond my attempts at description. 

It was an exquisite thing and infinitely valuable, and yet it was a piece of stone, and in my eyes not worth the carnage enacted in its name.

Yet Dior could not easily give it up. This was the jewel for which his mother and father had gone through so much pain, which represented his parents’ love and his mother’s lost immortality. Also, in mere statecraft, if he handed it to the people who had sacked his country he would seem weak and craven in a way that would diminish his authority with enemy and friend alike.

But if he did not give it up—if he knowingly left me in his enemy’s halls, then, as the voice had said, he would lose his honour, the trust of his people, and perhaps the love of his wife.

I could not be a party to this.”

Celeborn directed his gaze to the wheeling leaves that sheltered him, and contemplated whether he needed to record this for posterity or not. Was there anyone left on Middle-earth whose goodwill he feared to lose with too much honesty? 

There was not. 

“Also I feared...” Perhaps it was himself from whom he wished to hide this. But it was too late for that too. “I feared that Dior would choose the stone. No, I _knew_ that Dior would choose the stone over me, and that both of us would be wounded by that, in a manner from which it would be hard to return.

So it was with mingled fear and determination that—strengthened by the knowledge that there was something to escape for—I stretched out my mind through the rock with which I had become so familiar, until, on the very edge of my perception, I brushed up against the questing tip of a root.

An oak was growing there, anchored to the side of the mountain in a stony place. Its roots had been forced to go deep to find water. Slowly over centuries they had thrust their way through fissures in the rock down to the upper caverns of Nogrod, and there I met them. I sang to them in all my heartbreak and desperation, and they answered me, growing swiftly into my prison, forming—over mere weeks—a ladder I might climb to my freedom.

I wore then, as I do still, a cloak worked by Melian’s hands with songs of concealment and sheltering upon it, and wrapped in this I was able to make my way out of the dwarf caverns, stealing a little bread and water as I fled. As soon as I was beneath the open sky I ran like a wild hare for Menegroth, and thus—ragged and still half-mad—I met Dior coming in pomp with his army.

“Well met, Uncle!” said he, and Nimloth—in mail beside him—ran to sweep me up in her arms. She was sturdier than I, for I had starved I know not how long.

“You brought the Silmaril,” I exclaimed, choked on tears. “You truly were going to--”

But he cut me off, his fair face abrupt and a little ashamed. “No! No. We emptied the treasury in hopes that other wealth might satisfy. But that gem is not ours to give. It is all I have left of my mother, it is all that is left of the Two Trees of Valinor. It is too precious to be traded away like a trinket into the dark.”

Knowing that these would be his thoughts did not make them bite less deeply. As I accompanied the host to Menegroth, Elwing avoided my eye, and I battled the bitterness of having been found less worthy than a rock.

We arrived at Menegroth at noon, the broad light making plain how empty were its corridors. Guards were sparse, and half the lamps were broken, the carvings of the walls smashed and the many underground gardens bare and dead. I could feel the screaming in the stones, sense where blood had been spilled, and I had never heard the place so silent, so haunted by many ghosts. They stood in every passage, and at every corner one encountered memories of friends with whom it had been habit to meet at that spot, and now came nevermore.

More folk had lived than I had feared, but still we were weakened, wounded, and with Morgoth’s strength waxing by the day, this was not a good time to be weak.

“You should get rid of the Silmaril anyway,” I told Nimloth, one evening in my chambers when she had come to explain again that Dior’s clinging to the stone did not mean they loved me less. “It is because of that jewel that Elu died. Is that not reason enough to regard it as cursed? Give it back to the kinslayers and let it work its murderous luck on them.”

She laughed at that. “Now I know you speak only out of pique and wounded pride,” she said. “They are not worthy of it. It came to us as a sacred trust, and we must defend it.”

“With our lives?”

“If necessary,” she said.

Bitter beyond wormwood was that time to me, my home turned strange around me. I acknowledged Dior as Elu’s heir, but it jarred me every time I saw him on the throne. 

Dread grew on my mind day by day until it began to feel like I had never escaped the pit. For I _was_ piqued, and my pride _was_ wounded, but I knew in my heart that I was right. The light of the Silmaril was blessed, but oh, how deep were the shadows it cast!


	3. Chapter 3

“No one could accuse the Sons of Feanor of secrecy or of winning by stealth.” Celeborn had turned the page, and made a fallen tree of the initial ‘n’, sketching around it squirrels leaping from its branches, sparrows dispossessed flying from the nest. He had contemplated gilding and colouring the oversized letter, but had known again that he was stalling. That could come later once he had finished the tale.

“They rode up to Menegroth in the early morning, and I watched them come, for I had grown uncomfortable in the caverns and dwelt in a flet on the South side of the city. Often it had seemed to me that I had never returned–the city and I had both so changed that that world had already been lost. But when I beheld the riding of the sons of Feanor through our woods, I knew I loved it still.”

He rose, his body responding to no command of his mind as he paced from one side of the meadow to the next. Bright were the yellow celandine and the orange fox-and-cubs that nodded amongst the green grass, and the cornflowers were as blue as the sky above, opening in their brief flowering as though all there was in their short lives was sun and bliss.

Within him it was as if he tunnelled through a supporting wall. The whole structure of his mind groaned, shivered. His breath came fast as though something feared, something terrible, watched him from the shadows of the forest, and sorrow unassuaged all but overcame him. 

Returning to the tree, he snatched up the book and his pen, strode into the great house’s stableyard. The oak had helped him to rescue himself from the memory of being buried alive, but she could not help him with this. Who could? Where could he go to be safe from terrors that had already taken place?

As he saddled his horse, putting book, ink and pen into a saddlebag, he summoned his castellan by thought. A moment later, Erethon came running into the yard, struggling to fasten his streaming silver cloak. A march warden in Lorien, Erethon was now ancient by the reckoning of the world, and too dignified to be stumbling over his half laced shoes in a courtyard redolent of horse manure. Some of Celeborn’s inner trembling firmed at the sight.

“My lord?”

“I am visiting the white towers of Lindon, beyond the Shire,” Celeborn said, on an impulse. They were the last remnants of Beleriand. Perhaps there, the land itself might aid him in remembering. If he had his feet on stone that had suffered these things also, it might bear him up. “Take care of the valley while I am gone.”

“But you cannot go without an escort, Lord! Give me half an hour to assemble a force of archers, and supplies. Your campaign tent must be--”

The thought of it! Those many folk watching him, cataloguing the strangeness of his behaviour, speculating. Worse, those younger elves who remembered nothing earlier than the Fourth Age treating the journey as an adventure. Singing their light, nonsense songs as he grieved. “I will have no escort. I need nothing, and there is nothing on the roads more terrible than I.”

Erethon stepped back, clearly dismayed. “If the Twins were still here--” he began, as if to chide Celeborn with the phantoms of his grandchildren, departed into the West hundreds of yeni ago. The twins would have been concerned for him, yes. They would have feared this fey mood, tried to argue with him, soothe him, delay him until the fit passed by itself.

“Even were they here, I should do as I pleased,” he said, and swinging up onto Arloth’s back, he rode away before Erethon could say more.

That day, he rode as one pursued by a swarm of hornets. But at night, out in the wilds, where the trees stood against the stars like a writing of their own, he stopped and set the horse to graze. 

By some strange art which not even he understood, the Valar had preserved Shire and Havens through the Ice Age that reshaped Middle-earth into modern earth, and now they co-existed with the polluted half-corpse Men had made of the world. The walls between the two were thicker here than they were in Rivendell—where men still sometimes travelled from one to the other—but Celeborn could feel the melody of that other earth beneath this, like a lusty tone-deaf singer who did not know the words.

Both worlds were real, but sometimes it seemed to him that the world of Men was more so—that he dwelt in a pocket of someone else’s memory. The Valar’s perhaps. At times over the last centuries he had passed through the veil and walked in the modern earth, enduring the screaming as long as he could before he was forced to return.

He had not thought on it overmuch, supposing that both worlds were real, and if he gave this Man or that the inspiration to fight for the trees, then he was doing as much as he could. He had supposed that his guardianship of Rivendell meant something, preserved some remnant of something precious that needed to continue, some well of strength from which the world could renew itself.

But was that true? Or was Rivendell already in some kind of partial enclave of Valinor, remote from and helpless to heal the hurts of the world? Did he deceive himself in thinking he had anything left to give? If he gave up and passed into the West, would anybody or anything notice?

Arloth whickered and lipped at the ends of his hair, calling him out of the hole into which he had once more fallen. He thanked her, but he was shaken and cold as he had been since journeying beneath the mountain. It came to him like a revelation that he did not want to write this memoir.

On a whim, he set the saddlebags over his own shoulder, and released Arloth from her duty, telling her to return to her stable, or to go whithersoever else she wished.

Alone beneath the stars of Elbereth, surrounded by drowsy woods, their quiet and patient presences overlapping beneath his feet, he waited for comfort. Here he should feel more in command of himself, more like himself. Among the trees, Celeborn of the Trees should not but feel alive, present in himself and ready for what came next.

But comfort came not, only more dread. Like waves, like the waves of the sea as it flooded into Beleriand after the war of Wrath, an ennui, a deadness washed over him. He turned his face to the Ash tree against which he stood, and held on, and at last that sea ebbed again, leaving him drenched and shaking.

Something was wrong. Something about him was terribly wrong.

Even having sent the horse away, he could have made the journey to Lindon in two weeks, sleeping as he walked, loping through the trees like a grey wolf. But for some reason he was unendingly distracted. Here was a new tree sprung up since he had passed this way last. Here a rock formation had fallen, or been overgrown with moss. Once he waited a whole month by a place where the veil was thin, and he could watch the concreting of a meadow and the building of a cliff-like structure where the Men could house their cars. It sickened him, but not more than the thought of moving on.  
At last, his disgust with his own prevaricating grew to a pitch that he could no longer ignore, and he forced himself to trudge the rest of the journey one act of will after another. One struggle, one footstep, and then another. An endless series of small victories that won him nothing.

He passed through the kindly hobbit lands like a smoke, and laboured up the slopes of the Ered Luin as though his feet had turned to lead. And he did not understand either his reluctance or his insistence. It was but a memory. He could write it down at any time. He was not too weak to re-live that which he had already survived. He should go and get it over with, and then return to his life with one heavy duty expunged.

Or he could leave it. No one was forcing him to tell this tale. He could set it down and return to the last of his many homes, for there was no one there who would know that he had failed but himself.

And hand mastery of his own mind to cursed Caranthir? Admit that he was afraid? Acknowledge that there were things beyond his strength? Moments in his life so bitter his mind spat out even the taste of them?

No. He would not be defeated again. Not in the inviolable citadel of his own heart. What would be left of him if he was?


	4. Chapter 4

Arriving at the Westernmost tower at noon, he paced up the heavily worn steps like one bearing a burden. Spiders fled at his footsteps, and white doves exploded from abandoned rooms as he passed. Even in ruin, the towers were fair—strokes of pearly marble against a deep blue sky—but here too was an emptiness haunted by loss, and he walked on the small bones of mice, the pellets of white, night-flying owls.

He found an upper balcony scoured by wind and sea spray, sat there and balanced his book across his knees. 

“They were beautiful,” he wrote. “They and their army approached Doriath as the dew was lifting from the land. The water glittered in the manes of their pale horses, and the mists billowed about them, as though they breasted a river of milk. A kind of enchantment seized me at the sight of their fair faces, the glimmer of jewels in their hair and on their gear. Their banners flashed and fluttered like rising suns, and a faint light seemed to curl about the hooves of their horses.

I remember, very clearly, thinking that nothing so beautiful could possibly be a threat.”

His hand clenched as his heart sought to stop his mouth, the reluctance to go on washing in like a great wave from the sea. The urge to stand and look out at the ocean was so great it felt not like his will but like a possession, like the iron command of a ring of power.

“In this way I was as foolish as any of those who could not give up the Silmarils. For evil does not always declare itself aloud. It does not always look like orcs. Sometimes it looks like ourselves.”

Before he could break the quill, he set it gently in the inkwell and lowered his head into his hands, unable to unravel anything that came next.

Many years ago, in the middle of the First Age, when Men had first come to Doriath, the Eldar had seen upon them the echo of some primordial sin. A terror of which they would not speak. Celeborn had wondered at that time what could be too dreadful to remember. What could possibly remove the power of speech from a Child of Iluvatar.

In Doriath as it fell, he learned, for there it was he learned to fight and kill other elves. There the armies of the Noldor turned him into a kinslayer. The shock of it, the shudder, the feel of axe edge against elf bone was still in his arm, making his very flesh strange to him, cursed to him.

He gasped in a shuddering breath and wrote, “They cut down Dior and Nimloth with the same blow, for they were fighting back to back. The press was too thick, I could not--”

The nib broke against the parchment, ink spattering gore-like over his hands. He seized the next quill and wrote on before the power to do so left him.

“In the corridor outside the treasury the fighting was so fierce some died of suffocation, pressed in on all sides. There our guards took their last stand, and thence in battle madness came the sons of Feanor, their fine clothes drenched in blood, but flickering still with light, red and alien and glorious. It turned my stomach that I still found anything to admire in them.

‘Let them have their rock,’I thought, for with my brother’s daughter sprawled in the flood of gore, a Noldor spear through her throat, I had more important treasures to save. I fought my way to the nursery, where Elwing had been set to guard her brothers. I...”

He swallowed against a sudden rush of nausea, but did not pause in case he might not be able to begin again. 

“I hewed Remmingil the herald of Celegorm before the door. I remember yet the look in his eyes, for something in me died with him. Now I turn my mind to it, I see it as a void without end, a wound that does not heal.”

Perhaps the sea breeze would calm him, he thought, rising and leaning on the parapet, but there the shape of the cliffs were so familiar that they stopped his breath again. Here had been the Easternmost limit of Beleriand and he could almost see it, overlaid upon the current shapes of the world like a pillow pressed over the face of the land.

And now he was thinking of suffocation again because he could not breathe. His chest was tight and his hands shook. 

The seas ground the stones of his birthplace into sand beneath him, and his strength sucked out from under him as if it too had been pulverized to dust by the many ruinous passing years.

I cannot do this, he thought, as clear as though his voice had spoken it. What—could he really force himself to speak of the scrambling run, half blind with tears, he and Elwing had taken amid his men and her nursemaids through secret ways into the woods. The wails of Elurin—scarce more than a babe in the crook of his arm, the child’s face rubbed into the blood soaked into his sleeve?

Could he speak of the nigh hysterical laughter that had taken him when Elwing threw back her cloak and there upon her breast blazed the Nauglamir, and he had known, even then, that he would have to do this again, and again, and yet again, until death took him, or madness.

Untold aeons since, in thundery weather, he still woke in terror as he had woken when Elwing shook him, weeping, the tempest raging about her shoulders, and choked out the news that the boys were missing. Dog tired from fighting for three days, sitting in the slumbering camp, their guard too had nodded. They had wandered off, innocently, as children do, and though everyone had searched and shouted and screamed until their throats tore, although Elwing had dug her nails into her hair and drawn them down until her face bled, no one had ever seen the boys again.

Nothing he could say would capture how that felt. Nor, if he could capture it, would he inflict it on any other soul.

The sea, retreating, dragged with it all the colour in the world. The inkstains on his cuffs threatened to rise and engulf him. Another word would take the life out of him entire, and though he recognized his thoughts were nonsense, though he pushed his hand toward the paper with all his might, he could not make it move.

A small panic arose beneath his breastbone and pushed itself out. _Enough of this then,_ he conceded. _Move on to something of which you_ can _speak._

“Being warned by a dream not to go to Menegroth, Galadriel met me in Sirion.”


	5. Chapter 5

“There in Sirion the walls still stood, and bakers still rose with the dawn to put fresh baked breads on the breakfast table. One could sleep on smooth white sheets and wake to see the light curtains billow at the window where the sea-gulls wheeled over the bright sailed fleet. 

Galadriel was alight with a joy that I could not but find both oppressive and reassuring. I did not wish her to share my misery, but it sat ill on me that she did not. Oh, she grieved for Thingol who had been kind to her, and for friends lost, but it was not the total destruction of her world that it was for me. That, she had suffered earlier, and on reflection I had not treated it with the compassion it had merited. 

I was repaid, then. For though she was as gentle as she could be, still her mind was in the East, where she had found folk willing to regard her as a queen. There was a glow about her face as she told of how they had received her almost as another Melian. But this comparison did not mean to me what it had before.”

The wind sighed and sang a little as it whispered through the empty rooms about Celeborn, a fleeting peace in its chilly voice, as though the ghosts in the walls spoke of comfort. He took a deep breath and felt all the muscles of his back release at once, his shoulders loosening. 

There had been dread in Sirion too, for all had known that the sons of Feanor would come there next. But none knew the time of it, and one could say ‘perhaps not today,’ and savour ones food in peace. That measure of solace made it easier to continue.

“In Sirion,” he wrote, “it was yet possible to put off the end of the world until tomorrow. We waited for doom, but we did so surrounded by plenty. By a careful exercise of the mind—keeping it focussed only in the present moment—it was possible to enjoy what we had, to begin small projects of craft, to decide to learn the flute, to get excited about who would win the archery contest or bring home the biggest boat-load of fish.

This state continued for many years. I watched Elwing fall in love with young Earendil. I watched children be born, and I wondered how anyone could have enough hope in the future to bring new life into such a world, for we were—I thought—living as a man condemned to hang must live, his execution drawing nearer with every breath.”

He laughed, the sound harsh in the melancholy tower, the bark of it startling a fountain of doves into the air. Feathers fell like snow.

“At length Galadriel cuffed me on the ear. ‘I have had enough of your moping,’ she declared. ‘Come, we will run away from here and be wed in a land where I am queen.’”

He covered his eyes, briefly, as they stung. She would not have permitted him to wallow in the mood he was in now. But she too was gone. Life had scraped everything from the surface of him until it reached the bedrock. And that was barren, nothing left in it left to give.

“I knew the disaster would come for Sirion,” he wrote, dashing the tears from his eyes with the soft velvet of his sleeve. “Either Morgoth or the Feanorians would come, and there would be more death, more killing, more folk turned out to starve. Elwing could not wear that accursed jewel and not draw wrath upon the city. And she was my kin, the last link of blood I had to home and family. My duty was clear. I should have stayed. I should have died in her defence, in the defence of the city that had sheltered us. But I did not. I gave in to my dread, and my hope, and I let Galadriel save me.

“Every time Elwing’s son, Elrond, speaks with that Feanorian accent of his, I remember that I should have been there to rescue him from those madmen. I betrayed and abandoned him. I left Sirion in the days of its peace and I was feasting with the Avari of Arthedain when the haven fell and Elwing cast herself into the sea.”

A throb across his shoulders told him his moment’s reprieve from pain was over. The rippling of the silver ribbons of light, reflected from the ever changing sea onto the marble walls mocked him with its beauty, dreadful as an oncoming army.

“I know not how Elrond ever forgave me,” he wrote. “It did not even seem to occur to him to blame me. Yet I have rebuked myself for it for hundreds upon thousands of years.”

This was not what a scholarly document was for—not the confessional he had needed for half the lifespan of the earth. He crossed the sentence out so violently the page tore beneath his pen.

“Not even rumour reached us of the fall of Sirion in Arthedain. The elves of that land were indeed celebrating an unusually carefree year, as Morgoth’s forces concentrated themselves on Beleriand. That at least amuses me still. We, who heeded the call of the Valar, and found ourselves in the Westernmost part of Middle-earth, still think of these events as the end of days. But to the Avari, they were as nothing. Their lives of hunting, singing, waking the trees and soil, dancing in the glades and trading with the many and various Men of Ennor went on uninterrupted.

I do not know if it is a comfort or a further refinement of misery that the worst things in my life should have been so ultimately unimportant to so many people.

Yet even in Arthedain we noticed the rising of a new star. And even though there were many miles of sky between us, those who have experienced the touch of a Silmaril can recognize it well enough. There in the sky it shone like one of the holy stars of Elbereth, as though it had never been drenched in blood. It meant, to me, that my niece must be dead, and then for a time I wished to throw myself off a cliff and be so too. 

But to Galadriel it was as a summons. “The Valar are at work in this,” she said. “You know I have seen that no might of the elves shall bring down Morgoth—and that therefore there was no benefit to be gained in staying in Beleriand. But if the Valar are there, we must return, for I must face their judgement.”

Sick, she looked, but resolute, such that I did not dare tell her that I also did not wish to go. If the Valar came in force now, they should have come earlier, and I had some words for them that boiled in my eyeteeth like venom. I would not praise them for coming too late.

“When I look back, that time is a confusion,” he wrote. 

The sea whispered in his ears, every wave coming louder than the one before. He could hear the rocks shift below the water. Were the bones still down there, polished to pearls? Or had they too joined the sand? How much of the white sand of Alqualonde was made up of the skeletons of Middle-earth? The little hands and finger bones would go first, or perhaps the tiny bone in the ear, wearing away to dust and thence to nothing. 

Yet some corpses may have been found by the seed of corals. How many mounds were there, over which the blind, grasping flowers of the coral twisted, opening in beauty and hunger, where one might guess the shapes of fallen heroes by their mail-coats? How deep would one have to tunnel to find the swords once passed from father to child, the scraps of gold wire left from the embroidery of a cloak?

A rush of nausea drove him to his feet, and for a moment the wails of the dying seemed to echo to him from the water. Over the balcony a small fisher-boat was visible, weld-yellow sail luminous in the sunlight, and all was dazzle and freshness. Yet he found himself backing away, as it came to him how it would be if the dead were to rise, the rotting things clawing the boat under. The stink of algae and time—time as hollow and black as the centre of the earth.

He should speak of what he and Galadriel had done. Of finding the refugees—the humble folk displaced from their lands, with no weapon more advanced than a bill-hook with which to defend themselves—and evacuating them to Harlindon. Of the nights spent cold and hungry there while fire belched to the West. Children crying who could not be quieted even as Morgoth and the Valar moved like walking mountains on the edge of sight, and the ground shook.

But his hands shook also.

He jammed them into his armpits to warm and comfort them, rocking a little, his head bent akimbo on his neck and his gaze fastened to the balcony rail where a smudge of red paint triggered a memory. It flowered out into a recollection of this very place when the white stone had been beautified with a million painted flowers, gilded with gold. He heard again, distinctly, Oropher’s laugh behind him, in a room that had been hung with rich hangings and warmed by a dozen braziers in the shape of dragons--

The shape of dragons.

Oropher disappeared. The room disappeared. He was struggling up from his knees where the weight of its wing had knocked him. An endless serpent-belly passed over his head. His axe bounced from the scales, almost jarring itself from his grip. A stench like acid choked his nostrils. Its back talons reached for him, as behind him a half dozen Green-elf refugees struggled to set arrow to bow.

The wind of it! Its great wings sucked the air out from around him with every up-stroke. Hair streamed into his face as he struggled to stand upright. And then the down-stroke landed like a hammer and it had turned, and the great soot-stained muzzle gaped before him as the sardonic yellow eyes regarded him with cold contempt.

He staggered. No, it had been hot. Wings like a forest fire. His skin tightening, cracking. A dark shape in the centre of the fire. A hand like burning coal that had born him to the ground when he caught it on his spear.

A blow on his shoulder drove the wind out of him. He wheeled frantically, drawing a dagger, looking for this new assailant, and it was the wall. It was only the wall of the ancient elf-tower, bewebbed and grimy, with no live person in it but himself.

Panting hard, his breath catching on every inhalation, stuttering with a little sob on every out-breath, he put his back to the wall and let his knees give way as a terror stored in his bones for millennia worked its way out of the marrow and through him.

He slid down, covered his face in his hands and laughed. Balrogs and dragons. So many of them one grew numb to it. Yet this was not numbness. This was a fear never truly felt at the time, yet never truly forgotten.

Carefully, he touched his face. His skin was whole, his eye-lashes unburnt. Yet the pain was as fresh as though the fire that had scoured him had been extinguished only yesterday. Not even the memory of Vingilot sweeping down in a comet-trail of silver to drive its sharpened prow through the dragon’s spine was a comfort to him. Earendil had looked so strange, and the Silmaril bound upon his brow had made Celeborn’s skin crawl.

“I can’t do this,” he said again, and knew he spoke the truth.

Balrogs and dragons. Why would he bring the memory of them to trouble a world from which they had disappeared? Let them be gone. 

Let him be gone.

He breathed out a long sigh in which defeat turned by imperceptible degrees into a kind of relief. At the decision, the reprieve, he took in a deep breath of salty air. The sun kneaded his back. The little boat had reached the horizon and only elf eyes would still have seen it there, poised like an autumn leaf in the sweet cider haze between sea and sky.

The voice of the water had said nothing to him. Never had he heard the beckoning call that entranced so many of his kin. But the boat… that was eloquent.

Tough the tower was cracked and old, the boat was new. He had smelled the sap on it as it bobbed beneath the window. Its paint was lovingly whole—blue as a periwinkle with a yellow stripe like a band of gold. There was hope in its hand-carved timbers and pride in its carefully coiled rope. It knew nothing of the dead over which it sailed, and they had no power to haunt it.

_Balrogs and dragons,_ Celeborn thought, as one for whom the wound has been lanced and the throb given way to the ache of healing. _There are none left in this world who remember them save I. Let them be gone, therefore. For the loss of an old world is not always evil. How would a new story ever be written if the old was not permitted to end?_

Manwe’s face recurred to him, gorgeous and aweful as the unseen galaxies overhead. “See,” he said to it, surprised after all by how little shame there was in surrender, “Here where my first world ended, I let my last also lie. I cannot gainsay your will any longer, for I am very old and very tired, and it is time to give place to something new.” 

A sea-gull mewed above him, wheeling on the breeze, and behold, it was not a gull at all, but an eagle, pale as a swan. It levelled a strange, ruby-red eye at him, and let fall from its beak an acorn green as springtime. 

He was battered all over by memory and humbled, but he laughed. “You need not be so pointed,” he said tartly to the king of the gods—who had not yet gained his trust. “I have made my decision, no thanks to you, and I will be there as soon as I can find myself a ship.” 


End file.
